New Connections

Loni Philip Tabb

Loni Philip

Tabb

PhD

Assistant ProfessorDrexel University

Professional Bio

Dr. Loni Philip Tabb is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at Drexel University’s School of Public Health. She received her PhD in Biostatistics from Harvard University in 2010 where she developed novel statistical methods to address zero inflation in longitudinal count data. More specifically, she developed a marginalized zero-altered Poisson model to map and measure premature mortality and the effect of census tract poverty in the greater Boston area. Upon completion of this doctoral training, she returned to her undergraduate and graduate alma mater – she obtained her B.S. (2003) and M.S. (2005) in Mathematics from Drexel.

Since her arrival at Drexel University, she has collaborated as a Co-Investigator on several National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation funded projects. These projects range from extending her doctoral work with zero inflation in genome sequencing data to, more recently, her work on examining the spatial distribution of alcohol outlets in Philadelphia. In 2011, she was awarded a highly competitive university-wide award (Career Development Award) for junior investigators, and this award allowed Dr. Tabb the opportunity to focus on her research interest in spatial statistics and epidemiology.

Dr. Tabb also teaches several courses at Drexel, which include Advanced Statistical Computing and Survival Data Analysis for the graduate students obtaining degrees in biostatistics.

Project Description

The goal of this project is to examine the spatial and spatio-temporal relationship between alcohol outlet density in urban areas and the amount of violence surrounding these same outlets using rigorous spatial statistical methods. Alcohol-related violence is a serious public health concern, and, in order to fully understand this contextual relationship, especially in the presence of policy change such as privatization, complex statistical methods are necessary.

Consider, for example, in 2011, the state of Washington’s Supreme Court upheld a voter approved initiative privatizing liquor sales throughout the state. Because of this, the number of alcohol outlets in this state has increased and urban areas like Seattle have noticed an increase in the number of private businesses selling alcohol. The state expects the number of alcohol outlets to continue to increase; unfortunately, with this upsurge, it is highly likely that urban areas in the state will suffer from an increase in alcohol-related violence and morbidity. Whether or not this increase is statistically significant remains to be determined and is the motivation behind this proposed research.

Research Interests

Spatial Statistics and Epidemiology, Bayesian Statistics, Public Health (Law), Social Epidemiology, Mapping and Measuring Health and Social Disparities

The Details

New Connections Status: Junior Investigator,

Award Year:2013

Project Name:Examining the impact on alcohol-related violence of increased liquor outlets under privatization of sales.

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